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An anonymous reader writes "Google has begun charging OEMs for access to its proprietary Play Store applications for Android though the reported amount is as low as 75c per device. Between charging OEMs for Google Play apps, showing ads within these apps (Search, Maps and GMail) and profiling users with the data it collects this does show that Google is willing to leverage their stranglehold on the mobile market to control and monetize wherever it can. Add that these proprietary applications and the proprietary Google Play Services are the primary areas for Android innovation and development and you end up with an operating system that is less and less 'free' in the freedom and cost senses of the word."

Is that a serious question? Take a look at the proceedings from any security conference in the last 2 years and you can find a very long list. The latest trick is for individuals who release small apps for free or a token amount to be offered money to sell their app, especially if the app already asks for more permissions than it really needs (great incentives there...). The buyers then release a new version bundled with malware. The new version is installed automatically if it doesn't need any more permissions, and since most manufacturers don't ship software updates for Android phones in a timely fashion there are typically a few nice root vulnerabilities lying around on a significant fraction of the installed base. From there, the attacker can do what they want (attack mobile banking apps, harvest passwords, send premium-rate SMS, or just proxy all network traffic and inject their own ads, the last being the most common).

I know a couple of people who have turned down money to sell their (free, with only a few thousand users) apps for this purpose.

Of course he cant, it's the truthiness of it. How dare you doubt his completely unsupported supposition when the truthiness is clearly there.

But in reality, the number of compromised applications is incredibly low. Fake banking apps are removed almost as soon as they're added. For the most part you have crappy applications disguising adware and personal data collection (which Apple permits anyway), even these are very low in number. But the Anti-Android crowd would like you to believe you will get pwned as soon as you even breathe near the power button of an Android phone and have all kinds of whimsical arguments to prove it.

What he describes was recently in the news regarding a handful of popular browser add-ons primarily targeting Chrome because it's the most used browser globally.

A couple of browser extension developers sold their extensions which were then replaced with versions that injected ads into web pages and so forth. Google removed these add-ons from the Chrome add on store as soon as it was spotted.

I've heard of no cases of this happening with the Android store, and even if it has it's pretty clear that Google are

The message for businesses: Don't spend too much time worrying about mobile threats. "Don't completely forget it, but apportion your resources toward the actual risk in the real world, which isn't very much"

You know, where Android supplants all other OSs and electronic-based lifeforms?

Yeah, not going to happen. Google is now going to monetize, so you'll see forks like Amazon FireOS. Or you might see a resurgence of WindowsPhone Yes Android will continue to dominate, but it's not going to become some monoculture.

I thought they were already charging for access to the Google Play store and Google Apps like Maps. I thought that was why Android based devices like the Nook, Kindle; and Cyanogenmod releases didn't include access to Google Apps and the Store. Is that just a licensing restriction?

Is a 75 cent fee really significant to anyone that wants their Android device to have access to the Google Apps and Play store? It's not like there aren't alternatives (though the Google Maps alternatives are lacking).

If your vendor doesn't want to play ( no pun intended ) and send Google what could amount to millions with all the hassle that goes with it, you cant just pony up the 75 cents yourself.

I'm not sure if you're making a point or just stating how a license fee works.

But it sounds like a reasonable choice -- the vendor can save a dollar on the cost of the handset to be more price competitive, or they can add a dollar to the price and provide a feature that some users want (but others might not care about). I'm sure the front camera on my phone wasn't free, yet the manufacturer chose to put it in there and I paid for it even though I have never used it and am unlikely to ever use it.

OEMs already "paid" but they paid a nebulous amount of money to Google for support for the feature. Now they pay a well-defined amount of money. The deal has been altered, but it has been standardized. This will probably lead to more uptake of the store. OEs could even offer the same handset with and without google services, at different prices.

to a big poly corporation like samsung, giving out even the smallest sliver of pie isn't tolerable. samsung has their own android-clone operating system.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B... [wikipedia.org]

to a big poly corporation like samsung, giving out even the smallest sliver of pie isn't tolerable. samsung has their own android-clone operating system.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B... [wikipedia.org]

I think you mean Tizen [wikipedia.org], as far as I know, Samsung has given up on Bada.

I'm looking forward to seeing some Tizen devices, the more players the better. Microsoft hasn't shown itself to be a strong contender, so hopefully Tizen will do well.

Large companies like to poo-poo regulation, fees, etc. but they also realize it increases the barrier to entry which greatly benefits them.

Samsung has healthy profit margins and can cover the cost. Other manufacturers Samsung competes against will struggle just a bit more as a result. Some new guy on the block is really going to struggle if it's up-front per device manufactured and not done on a per-sale basis.

Per device fees don't really hurt the newcomers as much as the upfront certification fees and industry body membership fees that they already had. $0.75 per device is $0.75 whether you already sell millions of devices, or you are just starting out.

Good luck explaining to customers why a large number of third party apps that rely on Google APIs suddenly won't work on your new phones. They would be better off switching platform entirely than trying to fork Android.

Slowly but surely they are moving from a free and open operating system to a vendor lock-in proprietary system, they are the Microsoft of the mobile space but with one difference: they also build profiles on you to use for advertising by mining your data. It used to be that the services were free of cost because the cost was made up for with advertising revenue but they are now charging OEMs for it, sure the cost is small now but not so long ago it didnt cost anything and was free and open, it has gone a long way from that in a very short space of time so if you think a 75 cent fee will be the end of it you are looking at this with google glasses on.

Why do you think Microsoft isn't also building profiles on you to use for advertising by mining your data?

Maybe I'm missing something here, but I don't see what the big deal is. Like it or not, Google exists to make money. If they feel they have enough leverage to charge people for stuff that used to be free (be them consumers or OEM's), then so be it. If the market can't bear it, the endeavor will fail.

Too often I hear the people complaining about products or companies are the same ones buying their stuff. We are asking for companies to regulate themselves and do what's in our best interest, when we can't even regulate ourselves. I think that's the whole reason government regulation even exists for things like this, is because people know they lack the willpower to make a chance on their own (stop buying the product), thus need some kind of external force to demand it.

Once upon a time, Android was supposed to be an open-source OS anyone could take and work on, and not just "iOS, but designed by Google instead of Apple". These days you can have AOSP and attempt to scrape together an out-of-date OS and thirdparty services, or you can be a signed up licencee of Google's vision for mobile.

Without Google services, the value of an android device drops significantly.

Its not just about the 'market', as you also lose the entire Google ecosystem, Drive, Hangouts, etc etc.. Some you can access via web interfaces, some by 3rd party and others you cant get to at all.., and the ones you can manage to get to work wont will be fully integrated and its a huge kludge.

So what does this mean for people that run alternate OSs built from source ( like CMxxx ) or have "generic" products? What about people that have existing products with no vendor support? We will not have Google services at all and Google will disable it ( not just the play store, but everything that goes with services )?

Makes the devices pretty worthless for many, and might even drive people away from android.

CyanogenMod does not come with Play Store or Google apps (they stopped distributing them few years ago in September 2009 http://androidandme.com/2009/09/news/cyanogenmod-in-trouble/). If you want them you have to download and flash them separately. The only exception is Oppo N1 CyanogenMod Edition which applied and received the certification so it can include Play store. Most white box Chinese Android tablets did not include Play store either or if they did they used "borrowed" device IDs and pretended to b

you must not get out much into the true Chinese market. I would be hard pressed to find a device that didn't have the framework installed and operational. I'm not talking about the cheap crap at CVS or Walmart, but the true no-name products direct from the mainland.

True, i agree that Google has never 'approved' of this, but to be honest i don't give a flying-F what Google 'approves' of. I don't acknowledge the concept of IP, so will can do whatever i like.

There are the SELinux policies that got checked into 4.5 a few days ago which make it impossible for even a program running as root to extract and run files in the/data filesystem. Not an impossible task, but it will require all root apps to be re-engineered.

I don't think Google did this to lock out root apps, but plug some vulnerabilities, but there is a lot of bellyaching about this. It would be nice to have some switch to allow root apps (or just the su binary) to have their own SELinux security contexts, or a way to turn SELinux off without changing kernel arguments.

Doesn't seem like that big of a deal. Stock android doesn't have an su on it and there was no convention for having root apps, so the community created one. Well, now we just need to change the SELinux context. There are also frameworks out there for providing other non-stock APIs to root applications on near-stock firmwares. It will be nice if somebody comes up with an easy way to silently disable DevicePolicyManager for selected device managers...

Samsung can't (realistically) fork. They've agreed not to as part of their membership in the OHA. To fork they would have to leave Android compatibility behind. Meaning whatever OS they create cannot be Android compatible. Its not going to happen. Nor can Google get rid of Samsung as they have become the dominant player in Android. I think both companies would prefer the relationship were different, but neither is in a position to do anything about it.

Samsung can't (realistically) fork. They've agreed not to as part of their membership in the OHA. To fork they would have to leave Android compatibility behind. Meaning whatever OS they create cannot be Android compatible. Its not going to happen. Nor can Google get rid of Samsung as they have become the dominant player in Android. I think both companies would prefer the relationship were different, but neither is in a position to do anything about it.

AOSP is freely available for anyone, including Samsung, to take and fork. It's what Amazon did.Unless you know of specific contractual terms Google and Samsung have agreed to, Samsung is free to do what they want.If you do know of specific contractual terms Google and Samsung have agreed to, please post them, read them, then realize that Samsung is still free to do what they want - they'd just have to pay any penalties stipulated in the contract if they breach it.Hint: You don't know of any specific contr

The terms of using the Android trademark require that you can't distribute any kind of fork of Android. This is why Amazon makes sure to NEVER use the word Android anywhere on its products, nor can they ever have anything to do with the Play store.

Android the OS itself is still very much open, but the Android trademark isn't (nor is any trademark for that matter - the whole point of a trademark is to be exclusive rather than open.)

New Kindle Fire tablets are powered by the latest version of Fire OS—Fire OS 3.0 "Mojito", which starts with Android and adds cloud services

As far as I understood the restrictions, they could use the word Android, but they can't use the Google logo or Google Apps (Mail, Maps and others) without Googles permission. For Samsung, they might not be allowed to fork Android, but they do invest in Tizen. I'm looking forward to finally see the first devices.

For Samsung, they might not be allowed to fork Android, but they do invest in Tizen. I'm looking forward to finally see the first devices.

Tizen is not an Android fork. Tizen is built on Linux and the project resides within Linux Foundation. So, Samsung building Tizen phones doesn't break their agreement to abide by Google's OHA requirements.

I thought that is what I wrote? They can't fork Android, but they can invest in Tizen... That's why I'm looking forward to Tizen:-) I wouldn't if I thought it was Android...

This. I think Samsung was waiting to see how well Amazons and others did. The biggest threat to Android was never Apple & iOS, but Samsung. The question in my mind has always been, what happens if Samsung forks and derives their own OS without google...

This. I think Samsung was waiting to see how well Amazons and others did. The biggest threat to Android was never Apple & iOS, but Samsung. The question in my mind has always been, what happens if Samsung forks and derives their own OS without google...

What is Samsung going to do for apps if that happens? No one is going to buy a Samsung phone if there aren't much apps available. The window to defeat Google has closed. Motorola and Google Nexus line of smart phones and tablets have made Samsung not as important to Android's success as in the past.

This. I think Samsung was waiting to see how well Amazons and others did. The biggest threat to Android was never Apple & iOS, but Samsung.

What you call a threat, most of us call a thriving ecosystem. This is exactly what Android was designed for.

The question in my mind has always been, what happens if Samsung forks and derives their own OS without google...

I doubt that will happen. Why?BadaTizen

Samsung has tried and failed. I expect them to try again though, but breaking app compatibility with the existing catalogue and forcing new developers to choose between Android and Samsung would be suicide for them.

You misunderstand what Samsung is trying to do. Like most phone manufacturers they want to differentiate themselves. Why buy an S4 when you can buy a Nexus 5 for half the price? It's because you get all the Samsung stuff on it, like their camera app which actually has some useful features no-one else does. Of course you can debate how good things like Scalendar and Svoice are, but the reason they exist is to differentiate Samsung phones from all the others.

You know, as counter-Slashdot as it is to say this, I am really glad Google is closing off its Android apps. The worst parts of Androids have always been the open-source components, the modifiable OS and UI that third-party carriers and OEMs routinely turn to crap. The best parts of Android have always been the Googly bits, everything from Gmail to GCal to Hangouts to Google Now.

This may be an unpopular idea around here, but it can be argued that Google makes better software -- and more significantly, UX de

Yes, but I don't trust Apple to maintain Googleness or even Google-ability forever... or even for much longer.

I don't want to use Apple Maps or Bing with Siri or iCal or iTunes or iAnything, really. I want it all to be Google, and Google's the only one who can ensure that happens -- their competitors tolerate but do not celebrate their presence. And Apple has already shown it is willing to drop Google bit by bit the first chance it gets.

First off, I just want to clearly state that I have nothing against open source in general. I use VLC, Firefox, FileZilla, Putty, Linux, blah blah quite regularly. I appreciate openness as a design philosophy, and I CC-license almost everything I create. And besides, in many cases the open-source solutions are simply better than the proprietary ones.

But I do not believe Android to be one such case. The thing is, for lazy users like me, openness is just one criterion to be balanced against simplicity and usability. And Android does not do so well in that regard, which I believe to be a direct result of its intentional openness. I will explain in more detail below.

Then your problem is with the OEMs, not the open source components. And if you're in the US, the carriers.

No, I believe my gripe is with the inherent openness of Android. Please let me explain.

I believe Google embraced open source Android out of necessity, to get the carriers and OEMs on board. My guess is they believed they didn't stand a chance against iPhone's impending dominance unless they could convince the carriers and OEMs that they would be able to modify and brand their phones however they wanted to, to create a distinctly "them" experience and not just another behemoth out of their control -- meaning, they probably thought the OEMs and carriers didn't want to just swap Apple for Google and in so doing be reduced to indistinguishable common carriers. That would be a race to the bottom for them where all they could compete on would be minutes, data packages, and price (which is the situation now, but not when the iPhone and Android first came out). Instead, they sold the openness as an opportunity to for carriers and OEMs to create competitive advantages -- and charge non-commodity prices -- by differentiating their phone models from one another.

When all iPhones are the same, your carrier doesn't matter as much. When one Android phone only exists on a single carrier and that's the phone you want, well, suddenly the OEM and the carrier both have meaning to you as the consumer again.

Not terribly relevant, especially when you consider that Google created all of the open source bits of Android.

It's not the Google open source stuff that's bad, it's the stuff everyone else added, changed, or removed because Android's openness allowed them to do so. It's a subtle but significant distinction. Openness isn't inherently bad, but Android's openness ceded Google control to less capable third parties, who by and large produced crap.

The crappiness in this wasn't intentional (I would hope), but the openness was.

If Google had retained complete control over its platform from the get-go, we would not have seen things like carrier-disabled tethering, Verizon's betrayal of the Nexus line, slow-ass/eternally-forgotten Android updates, useless bundled apps, conflicting address books / calendars, SIM/phone storage storage differences across vendors, device-specific apps and accessories, 400 different screen sizes and resolutions, etc.

And if Google had done that, Android probably never would've taken off. So it's understandable why they chose it, but the result for end users is a much messier ecosystem of products and even services.

For folks like me who just want a way to effectively use their Google accounts on the go, Google usually does it a lot better first-party than third party, open-source attempts.

>> Do you even know what you're talking about?

I'm not sure what you dislike about that statement, so please clarify.

I mean things like third-party Gmail clients (sometimes integrated into the phone), annoying OEM skins instead of the Google launcher interface, carrier-specific tethering solutions instead of the stuff built into Android, third party camera and gallery apps that leave out Panorama, Photosphere, and Picasa sync, third party address book solutions inferior to the Google contac

.... My phone (a VZW Galaxy Nexus), on the other hand, is crap because Google ceded some of its control to Verizon. So I can't tether or get timely Android updates or clear off the Verizon crap unless I install a third-party ROM, and even then I have to jump through hoops to get the latest Google Apps, and I will always be months behind on Android version updates. If Android were closed to begin with like iPhone was, Verizon could not have done that -- but they also probably would not not have taken Android in to begin with.

That's why, my GSM galaxy nexus is running the latest official google version of android -4.4- (which, it is perfectly capable of running). Oh wait, there's no such thing.
What there is, is AOSP, openness (in a way), that openness gave me (and many many others) the possibility to to get updates, tinker, add features (caller name display comes to mind, there was none for a long time, and it wasn't free).
You want the "Google experience"? Fine buy a google phones from the google play store using your goog

If Google had retained complete control over its platform from the get-go, we would not have seen things like carrier-disabled tethering, Verizon's betrayal of the Nexus line, slow-ass/eternally-forgotten Android updates, useless bundled apps, conflicting address books / calendars, SIM/phone storage storage differences across vendors, device-specific apps and accessories, 400 different screen sizes and resolutions, etc.

Wait, what? WHAT? [citation needed] because most of those things would stll have happened. Many of them have actually happened on iPhone.

The overarching point of my argument is that Android would be better if it were solely controlled by Google in a fashion similar to iPhone or Kindle Fire, not because open-source is inherently bad, but because Android's particular implementation of open-source design meant that carriers and OEMs could and did take good open stuff and replace it with closed crap.

And it's wrong, for two reasons. One, AOSP. Two, there have been non-crapped phones all along, and unlike in iPhoneLand we had customer choice. But there has been no iPhone ever which has embraced customer choice. They spend all their effort preventing you from doing things with your device.

its not really the "open sources world" that fucks up Android. The fact that maunfacturers do fuck it up is because of its open nature but I think all you can say is that phone manufacturers suck at UX. I don't think Android is an indication that open source as a whole sucks at it.

I might agree with that statement but Android is not evidence of it... its not a community making those shitty UIs its Samsun or HJC or formerly Motorola.

Nexus 5 has dedicated voice recognition hardware that listens even when the main CPU on the phone is in sleep mode. It can wake the main CPU when it hears a magic phrase ("OK Google"). Google Now isn't listening on the mic though - if the magic phrase has not been detected, the audio never leaves the dedicated voice IC.

The only phones where the mic is always on are the Moto X, Droid Mini, Droid Ultra, and Droid MAXX. The Nexus 5 is the only phone with the Google Experience Launcher, which only listens when the home screen is on.

There is a white knight saving us from Google domination while still firmly grounded in the Android camp: Cyanogenmod. They're starting to ship presintalled in devices, now. I hope it's an ongoing trend, since the true power of open source is the ability to fork. And if more and more closely related forks appear, Google will want to keep everything compatible with its Play Store, which will halt its gradual proprietarization (eh?) of Android.

The pre-installed Cyanogenmod on the Oppo N1 is Google certified, akin to TouchWiz on Samsung, Sense on HTC, or Timescape on Xperia, and not exactly a fork.

They're not charging me. They're charging the OEM, who will pass on the cost to me without providing me an option of opting out, for something that they will then use to harvest personal information about me to sell to advertisers. Give me a phone for $2 less without the Google crap and I'll happily take it in preference.

$0.75? How about you leave that out and I'll take it for $2.00 less? How does that logic work?

Profit margins and overheads for manufacturer, distributor and retailer. That's about the right ratio by the time this gets to retail shelves. Except that at retail they'll likely want to round it to XX9.95 or XX9.99, so the end effect on the price is either $0 or $10.

How does that logic work? Besides, you can easily remove the Play Store from most devices.If not, this site might not be for you.

Yes,,,, but for many not aware of/. the reality is that Google doesa little to a lot of work on the cruft that folk toss onto the applicationpile. They have apparently started looking hard at abuses somesoftware vendors were updating twice a week to update embeddedmarketing and advertisements... because I suspect the bandwidthwas free. From benign to just durn nasty there are many abuses thatgoogle is looking to squash (and has already).

Despite have a tremendous number of Android smart phones active world wide and over 48 billion apps installed the Apple App store blows away Google Play revenues.

that's like saying people who own $1M+ homes also spend more on cars. duh? apple sells high-end devices, and it's users spend for money on add-ons such, peripherals, and cases.

google doesn't care. they want people using their search and services. sure, they are happy to earn $ from the play store, but search profits dwarf what apple makes on their app store. the are about getting the largest # of devices in the most hands, not add-on sales.

Google makes more lifetime revenue from each iOS device sold, on average, compared to each Android device, on average. Even if we limit the comparison just to high end Android devices, it's probably a close comparison.

sorry. you can't just compare apple w/ the latest greatest android device. you have to take into consideration the bulk of the android market that is mid to low-end devices. of course those are included in the stats.

or did you have some data on how much nexus 5 users spend in apps vs. apple users? no? then why are you making the comparison?

do you have any breakdown of how much high-end android phone users spend on apps vs. apple users? no? do you know they don't spend as much as apple users? duh. it's well understood that there are many, many more low-end android devices compared to zero low-end apple devices.

it doesn't take a genius here to understand that the difference is economic.

that's like saying people who own $1M+ homes also spend more on cars. duh? apple sells high-end devices, and it's users spend for money on add-ons such, peripherals, and cases.

Its more like saying people who dont know much about cars, spend more on cars.

Someone who doesn't bother to learn about how their car works will pay $500 for a oil change and brake check, someone who does and just cant be arsed doing it themselves will pay $100.

The person who doesn't know much about cars pays full list price for an Infiniti G37, a person who knows the Infiniti is just a Nissan Skyline 370GT with a different badge and bigger price tag gets the Nissan with a few thousand off the asking

I'm an independent software developer. I work in a large community of software developers. Two years ago when we did projects for ourselves or startup ventures it was pretty common to try to release the iOS and Android version of the app as close as possible and with the same feature sets. What we found was the sell through rate on iOS was huge compared to Android. At the same time we found the piracy rate of Android was huge compared to iOS.

the original post said android users are loathe to purchase apps. that's wrong. lower-income users are loathe to purchase apps, and are more likely to pirate them (more time than money). yep, it is what it is, but characterizing all android users as "loathe" to purchase apps is not correct.

p.s., re-check your findings now that the iphone is released in china.

Having spent time in that part of the world I can attest the idea behind copyright of virtual things is cultural. They don't see stealing it as being wrong. Some even see it as their nationalistic duty to take things from the west to level the playing field. Generally in the US you can't lease space in a mall and open a store that sells clearly pirated software. But over there? It's not a problem until a representative from a Western company makes a complaint. It's an apples to oranges comparison.

Yeah, I'm struggling to see the cause of the hysteria in the summary, especially as Google doesn't have a stranglehold on mobile, and Google supports the only major mobile smartphone platform open enough to allow multiple app stores to co-exist.

Oh wait, I know the cause of the hysteria: Facebook. Specifically, the money FB has been paying to their shills to post anti-Google nonsense lately.

The funny part is that Google is genuinely easy to criticize, but these idiots insist on focussing on stuff that's

Pretty much. As someone involved in cross-platform app development, iOS is still the undefeated king at around 75% of app sales. Even better, iOS sales result in 1.5x-2x better return on average overall.

How do the revenue numbers look when you add in apps? The last numbers I saw were about a year ago so things may have changed, but back then iOS users were a lot more likely to buy apps, but Android had a much bigger share of downloads for ad-supported apps. The revenue was about the same for both platforms, because you'd get less from the ad sales in Android apps, but you'd get more downloads.